Selected poems
It's
It's not the trees, the tall lemon-scented eucalyptus under which his mower released aromas of spring year-round, or the stout, spreading old peach boughs from where, before it died of old age, one lad fell like Icarus through leaves dappling the sun, this boy's youngest brother one day old in hospital where they visited that morning before returning in the afternoon for plaster of Paris, their mother wondering why they were back so soon; or the jacaranda's hard aromatic wood, blue blooms like a painting caressing the big window next to their solid dining-table where he and that day-old baby a dozen years on received a shock from a lightning strike felt through its polished walnut. It's not the glory grape vine , large leaves brushing his open window two metres from his pillowed head where he read and wrote while the hours ate his life. It's not the towering golden cypresses under which they buried, aptly, cats, dogs, and even a horse. It's not the outside buildings, grey palings warped, the big ramshackle barn of cracked weatherboards where those boys set up their own TV/games room, or the former outside laundry where tools and dated items that might come in handy but never did, shaded by avocado trees grown from composted pits, ideal for breathless hide-and-seeks, those phantom figures flitting in, on, behind, and up those beloved trees and outbuildings. It's something else he misses that stabs his old heart. It's the door frame of dressed timber where he measured their height, etching biroed figures ever rising into tough, unforgiving gloss paint he misses the most of all the things you can't take with you when it comes time for sojourns to end.
Nostalgia
Self-pity disguised as love tiptoeing in with the plash, the smell of rain, or a crosshatched ink sketch of a gaunt pier, or the sky's famous late fade from blue, regret resonating deep in the maw, hens scratching, a flagged kitchen floor. Sounds prompt it; think foghorns, the knelling of distant bells, listen to One Fine Day, or Satie's lonely piano. Love's old dance induces it, too; those movies over the years with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy ageing like once good ideas, and certain books, always. Enter an attic's dead air, or stare into firelight's glimmer alone of a winter's evening.
School yearbooks, citations of success, stained letters, attract its churn, the scent of lavender, birthday paper